I may have a face for radio, but you, sir, have a brain for television.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Hey Fred Thompson! Remember that time you lobbied for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association?

Fred Thompson is a pretty typical Republican't. Except for the fact that he lobbied for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA). The website of NFPRHA says:

The National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association (NFPRHA) is a non-profit membership organization based in Washington, D.C. that has served as an important source of advocacy, education and training for the family planning and reproductive health care field for more than 35 years. NFPRHA's mission is to assure access to voluntary, confidential, comprehensive, culturally sensitive family planning and reproductive health care services and to support reproductive freedom for all. NFPRHA represents providers of care: public, private, domestic and international as well as researchers, educators, consumers and advocates. NFPRHA members provide reproductive health care services at nearly 4,500 clinics to more than 4 million women annually.

This is an organization that matches my political ideals and is the EXACT ANTITHESIS OF EVERY REPUBLICAN'TS'.

If Fred Thompson wants to support an organization like NFPRHA, that is great and more people should, but I would appreciate it if he would be more honest in his rhetoric. Of course, I should remember that Republican'ts are rarely honest about anything. Instead, they issue denials. If Fred Thompson had been a customer at my former place of employment, I imagine a typical conversation would go something like this:

ME: Mr. Thompson, your account has a rather severe late fee and I'm afraid you have to pay this before I can let you rent...If These Walls Could Talk?FT: There is no possible way I could have accrued any late fees.ME: Well, our records indicate that you kept Bloodrayne, Alone in the Dark and House of the Dead for more than three weeks.FT: No I didn't.ME: Remember that part in Bloodrayne where Meatloaf is surrounded by all those naked Romanian hookers? Wasn't that great?FT: Yeah, that was awesome! I watched that over and over for weeks!ME: This is the part in the conversation where you admit to keeping the movies for three weeks and pay the late fees. I'll even let you use campaign contributions.FT: I didn't keep those movies for three weeks.ME: You just said you watched Bloodrayne for weeks.FT: No I didn't.

And so on.

Some people rush to defend Thompson because they just love him on Law & Order. As much as it pains me to link to Paste Line Blog:

But a lobbyist, like lawyers in general, represents clients. To assume that a lawyer always agrees with the clients he represents is not only juvenile, it tends to undercut the premises on which our legal system is based. A lawyer needs to be able to represent, for example, a man accused of homicide without being labeled pro-murder.

This is technically true. For a public defender. If we look at the text of the LA Times piece:

Fred D. Thompson, who is campaigning for president as an antiabortion Republican, accepted an assignment from a family-planning group to lobby the first Bush White House to ease a controversial abortion restriction, according to a 1991 document and several people familiar with the matter.

We find a different story. Lobbyists are not soldiers who must march off to war regardless of the feeble justifications and outright lies of their Commander in Chief.

Fred Thompson's flunky, Mark Corallo, "adamantly denied that Thompson worked for the family planning group.'Fred Thompson did not lobby for this group, period,'" according to the same LA Times article. Mark Corallo is not one to let the facts deter him: both former President of NFPRHA Judith DeSarno and former Representative Michael Barnes say that Thompson accepted the lobbying job.

The situation boils down to this: Thompson has a mighty big skeleton in his closet that makes him look like a munchwad. I almost used the word hypocritical before munchwad in that sentence, but really for a Republican't to take money from one group and then claim to support the other side of the argument is standard operating procedure. Rather like Cheney's infinite deferments or Bush's invisible tenure at the National Guard. Maybe Thompson is exactly the candidate the party needs.

If I weren't such a lazy bastard, I would have blogged this yesterday when my source contacted me to show me this. Maybe I would have beaten the Huffington Post to the punch.